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100 DAYS FOR ALAA - ١٠٠ يوم لعلاء

100 DAYS FOR ALAA ١٠٠ يوم لعلاء

Alaa Abd El Fattah, one of Egypt’s most high profile political prisoners, has been imprisoned for nearly five years - charged with organising a protest.

Alaa’s release date is March 17th 2019.

This website seeks to re-focus public attention on Alaa and his case in the lead up to his release date. We want to ensure he is released on the day. It gathers all of Alaa's major writings, key essays written about him, international advocacy judgements found in support of him, press clippings and photographs. At its centre is a Timeline that gathers all these materials together.

Following his release we will be campaigning against the second half of his sentence - the 'parole' period - in which Alaa is expected to spend every night in his local police station for five years.

Please send us any essays, photos or acts of solidarity and we will re-publish them here. This is an open-source campaign - we'll be putting out some new ideas, but need new thoughts and new energy coming in too. So get thinking with us!

The hashtag, as always, is #FreeAlaa - please join us in preparing the ground for Alaa's release.

ABOUT ALAA

Alaa Abd El-Fattah is an Egyptian blogger, software developer and a political activist. He is currently serving a five year prison sentence in Egypt.

He was arrested in November 2013, three months after Abdel-Fattah el Sisi's coup d'etat and after a trial that lasted over a year, was sentenced to five years imprisonment, charged with the organisation of a protest.

Alaa first came to prominence for co-founding, along with his wife Manal Hassan, the Egyptian blog aggregator Manalaa and Omraneya, the first Arabic blog aggregators that did not restrict inclusion based on the content of the blog. In 2005 the Manalaa blog won the Special Reporters Without Borders Award in Deutsche Welle's Best of Blogs competition. Alaa was a central figure within the blogging movement of the early 2000s, then a vanguard of free speech and radical discourse that would become one of the catalysts of the 2011 revolution.

During the revolution Alaa rose to international prominence through the combination of his online presence, on-the-ground activism, incisive analysis and uncompromising politics. Elevated to almost symbolic status as representing the new generation of revolutionary youth Alaa was at the vanguard of several political currents within the revolution, and became a prinicpal target of the old regime's attempts to re-assert dominance.

He was imprisoned for two months by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in 2011, but his release was forced by public pressure - a gauge of the strength of the revolutionary currents at the time.

After the coup d'etat of 2013, Alaa was among principle targets of the counter-revolution and has, unfortunately, been held in the regime's prisons since then. The bulk of material on this website concerns this period.